Curatorial

SOUND
Trahern Gallery, Jan. 20-Feb. 6, 2015

    As counterintuitive as an art exhibition focused on sound seems, sound art has been around for a long time, becoming a distinct medium for artists in the 1960’s. Sound has also been the focus of many important exhibitions in institutions like the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Walker Art Center. In 2010, sound artist Susan Philipsz won the prestigious Turner Prize. It’s time has come.
    The major questions one might ask when encountering an exhibition like this is: what is sound art and how does it differ from music? To be honest, we are still figuring that out. As most sound artists do, we start identifying the medium through the work of John Cage. Cage was a composer who approached sound in a very pure way. As the chief curator of the Walker Art Center Darsie Alexander stated about Cage’s work: “It didn’t have to tell a story, it didn’t have to crescendo - sound was its own medium’. Perhaps music can be defined as sounds that combine to produce harmony and sound art can be defined as conceptual art works that utilize sound as a medium without concern for harmony. Maybe not.
    Sound contains the work of 17 artists whose work focuses on sound as their primary medium. We attempted to select a range of approaches to sound art in the exhibition, but our main criteria was that it had to knock our socks off. The exhibition includes field recordings, found sound, spoken word, data based sound, and work that was created by using both analogue and digital tools.

Michael Dickins
Barry Jones

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